"You'self go to haitch!" the unrelenting complainant called after him.
The judge effected a rumbling withdrawal. The night was again calm. Then I slept on the problem of the Arrowhead's two-gun bad man. It seemed now pretty certain that the fatuous Boogles had grossly overpraised him. I must question his being the real doughnuts of any sort—even the mildest—much less the real Peruvian. But what was "'em" that in degrading punishment and to the public shame of the Arrowhead he must wear on the morrow? What, indeed, could "'em" be?
I woke, still pondering the mystery. Nor could I be enlightened during my breakfast, for this was solitary, my hostess being long abroad to far places of the Arrowhead, and the stolid mask of Lew Wee inviting no questions.
Breakfast over, I stationed myself in the bracing sunlight that warmed the east porch and aimlessly overhauled a book of flies. To three that had proved most popular in the neighbouring stream I did small bits of mending, ever with a questing eye on adjacent outbuildings, where Little Sure Shot—née Time—might be expected to show himself, wearing "'em."
A blank hour elapsed. I no longer affected occupation with the flies. Jimmie Time was irritating me. Had he not been specifically warned to "wear 'em" full shamefully in the public eye? Was not the public eye present, avid? Boogles I saw intermittently among beanpoles in the garden. He appeared to putter, to have no care or system in his labour. And at moments I noticed he was dropping all pretense of this to stand motionless, staring intently at the shut door of the stable.
Could his fallen idol be there, I wondered? Purposefully I also watched the door of the stable. Presently it opened slightly; then, with evident infinite caution, it was pushed outward until it hung half yawning. A palpitant moment we gazed, Boogles and I. Then shot from the stable gloom an astounding figure in headlong flight. Its goal appeared to be the bunk house fifty yards distant; but its course was devious, laid clearly with a view to securing such incidental brief shelter as would be afforded by the corral wall, by a meagre clump of buck-brush, by a wagon, by a stack of hay. Good time was made, however. The fugitive vanished into the bunk house and the door of that structure was slammed to. But now the small puzzle I had thought to solve had grown to be, in that brief space —easily under eight seconds—a mystery of enormous, of sheerly inhuman dimensions. For the swift and winged one had been all too plainly a correctly uniformed messenger boy of the Western Union Telegraph Company—that blue uniform with metal buttons, with the corded red at the trouser sides, the flat cap fronted by a badge of nickel—unthinkable, yet there. And the speedy bearer of this scenic investiture had been the desperate, blood-letting, two-gun bad man of the Arrowhead.
It was a complication not to be borne with any restraint. I hastened to stand before the shut door of the sanctuary. It slept in an unpromising stillness. Invincibly reticent it seemed, even when the anguished face of Jimmie Time, under that incredible cap with its nickeled badge, wavered an instant back of the grimy window—wavered and vanished with an effect of very stubborn finality. I would risk no defeat there. I passed resolutely on to Boogles, who now most diligently trained up tender young bean vines in the way they should go.
"Why does he hide in there?" I demanded in a loud, indignant voice. I was to have no nonsense about it.
Boogles turned on me the slow, lofty, considering regard of a United States senator submitting to photography for publication in a press that has no respect for private rights. He lacked but a few clothes and the portico of a capitol. Speech became immanent in him. One should not have been surprised to hear him utter decorative words meant for the rejoicing and incitement of voters. Yet he only said—or started to say:
"Little Sure Shot'll get that Chink yet! I tell you, now, that old boy is sure the real Peruvian—"